The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computer network management protocols enable administrators to manage network paths and allocate resources for communications between networked computers. For example, ICMP traceroute is used to discover the IP addresses of interfaces on systems along a path. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM, MPLS-OAM) follows an MPLS label switched path (LSP) discovering systems and MPLS labels along a path. Ethernet OAM (E-OAM) is similar to MPLS-OAM for Ethernet domains. Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) and Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) may discover information about connected neighbors. Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) allows messages to traverse systems along a path for a special-purpose application that concerns reservation of resources for quality of service (QoS) purposes.
System management tasks include configuration and data collection. Performing system management tasks may require the administrator or a management application to send multiple messages to networked computers. For example, a path discovery message to a target computer may be used to determine a path to the target and multiple second, separate messages may carry a management request to each node along the path. This approach requires too many messages in the network and too much processing at the management station.